Course content

Clinical Practice Intensive

This is an intensive week of focused skills practice around a variety of themes and common clinical dilemmas, for example: what do you do when a young person doesn’t talk? Or when someone has been labelled “hard to engage”, “obstructive” or “defensive”? Or when you’re faced with an entrenched anorexic presentation? Or when someone doesn’t want to be there?

All participants are invited to bring a couple of real life dilemmas from their practice for the group to work with. Videotaped or DVD’d examples are particularly welcome. Additionally, there will be opportunities to be interviewed and experience an Outsider Witness Group. We will practice using different maps in interview scenarios, linking the maps together and charting conversations as we go. Interviews will be reviewed and learning points detailed.

This module will be hard work but the atmosphere is highly supportive. We are confident that participants will experience a clear advance in their narrative practice skills, and that these skills will be relevant to a variety of work and clinical contexts.

Typical topics covered include:

• Practicing using different maps in a variety of clinical situations
• Using the scaffolding Distance meta-map to guide questioning sequences in live and role-played clinical interviews.
• Using “Therapist Positioning” ideas to orientate ourselves in de-centred but influential ways when under pressure.
• Trying out a variety of practice strategies in demanding and challenging role-played clinical situations
• Opportunities to be interviewed about your work and to be at the centre of Outsider Witness Group reflections.
• Deconstructing interviews as they unfold to chart them on different practice maps
• Supporting the learning of others using different styles of feedback.
• Reviewing videotape of clinical practice and participating in peer supervision.
• Intensive focus on the micro-skills of practice – the language, the sequencing of questions and the moment by moment attunement to the interviewee’s experience.

Working with the effects of trauma

There are many contexts within which people experience trauma. This module explores how narrative ideas and practices are used both to help people find preferred identities that have been lost through trauma, and also how a narrative ethic might lead us to respond to the contexts of trauma. Participants will be encouraged to bring issues and dilemmas from their own work experience for the group to work with. This is a highly practical module which is mindful of the many dilemmas when working in this area.

Typical topics covered include:

• Understanding the absent but implicit and it’s use in working with the effects of trauma
• Working with the effects of sexual abuse.
• Considerations when working with issues related to domestic violence
• Working with families when there has been a traumatic loss
• Working with refugees and asylum seekers
• Practices of accountability
• Use of the Tree of Life
• Developing nurturing teams
• Taking testimonies

Social context, discourse and power

This module is an exploration of broader social contexts, how these influence all of us in the way we make sense of life and how narrative therapy brings these considerations into practice. These understandings will be explored in relation to a variety of working contexts and practice issues, including eating disorders. This module will include opportunities to learn about the most recent developments in narrative practice.

Typical topics covered include:

• The theories of Foucault and modern power
• Different ways to bring considerations of power and discourse into conversations
• How to make the ‘shoulds’ of life’ visible
• How to respond when people are experiencing an overwhelming sense of personal failure as workers, parents, carers, partners etc: reviewing the Failure Conversations Map.
• How to have respectful conversations which invite an evaluation of the norms and ‘shoulds’ of living: the Context and Discourse Map
• Externalising practices which move beyond ‘technique’
• How to respond to complexity and avoid positioning people into impossible ‘for’ or ‘against’ positions
• Working with disorders of eating such as anorexia
• How to work with ‘ambivalence’
• Recent developments in narrative practice: the theories of Gilles Deleuze, lines of flight and practices of possibility

Linking lives and working with groups and communities

This module focuses on different practices which link people together around the values they hold as important, and which can be used to address concerns shared by different communities or individuals.

Typical topics covered include:

• Identity as relationalIssues of loss and bereavement
• Working with communities
• Working with groups
• Outsider witness practices
• Other practices of linking lives

Using narrative in the process of supervision

How can we provide supervision in ways that are consistent with narrative understandings and
approaches? Can we use maps of narrative practice in supervision in the same ways as in therapy?
What are the hopes of a narrative supervision? What if the supervisee wants our advice? What
are the issues of power and hierarchy in the supervision context? Is ‘supervision’ a helpful term or
would other words such as ‘intervision’ construct a better context? What is the difference between
supervision and consultation?

Typical topics covered include:

• Consideration of many of the questions above
• Practices that attend to experiences of ‘burn out’
• Ideas for constructing a narrative supervision
• Dilemmas of a narrative supervision
• Differences and similarities with therapy
• Using micro-maps of narrative practice in supervision and consultation
• Ideas for group supervision
• Practice, practice, practice!
• More practice…